Wednesday, July 2, 2008

I love garlic butter, and I mean who doesn't, right? But since my sister brought me a jar of black olive paste from Italy I decided to dress my normal garlic butter in black. I can almost say that black is the new garlic!

This is so easy to make, and really nice to have arround. You can spread it on bread, toss pasta with it, fry your steaks or enrich your sauce with it. I usually butter some nice crusty bread and then toast it on the grill. The bread gets all crunchy and the butter melts and moistens the bread crumb and oh my... You can eat like that or top it with tomatos, mushrooms, tuna or whatever you like and make yourself some nice bruscheti!
I'll tell you how to do it, but first...

Look what I got! Jenny from Picky Palate was nice enough to pass this on to me. Thanks Jenny, someday I'm going to send you the bill for a new keyboard for my computer, because I drool so much over it whenever I visit your blog! And so now it's my turn to give it to 5 other Yum-yumers, check them out:

Leslie from The Hungry Housewife. Leslie allways has nice "PMS Treats" as we like to call it and she's very funny as well. Her blog will make you laugh and drool.

"Prudy" from Prudence Pennywise. She posts daily about great food on a budget and she has the best ideas. I love her "plan-aheads"!

Patricia from Technicolor Kitchen. Patricia is such a sweetie, she allways has a nice thing to say about the recipes she makes and everything she does turnes out beautiful!

Ann from Velvet Lava. I just love her and her blog! She makes me laugh out loud and allways bakes things I would like to eat.

Tanya from Take the Cannoli. A fellow pastry chef with a very cute blog. I allways enjoy her cupcakes.

And speaking of Tanya, she tagged me for a meme a few days ago, but I had done one very similar a while back, so I'm just going to link here. Is that ok Tanya?

But let's get back to this butter, shall we?

I don't really have a recipe for it, I usually just eyeball it, but I'll put aproximate amounts here so you can have an idea. But just do as you like it. Do it without the olive paste if you prefer a plain garlic butter. If you can't find olive paste, it's just a kind of a paste made with stoned black olives and a tiny bit of olive oil and salt, so you can make your own.

GARLIC & OLIVE BUTTER

120 gr (4.3 oz/about 1 stick) butter

5 cloves of garlic (pressed with a garlic presser or very finelly chopped)

1 tsp salt (or to taste, depending also if using salted or unsalted butter)

1 tsp oreganos

1 tsp finelly chopped parsley

1 dash pepper

2 tbsp grated cheese

1 tbsp black olive paste

On a small sauce pan take the butter and the garlic and let the butter melt on a very low heat. Add the rest of the ingredients and take out of the stove. Cool at room temperature until it's not so hot and then take it to the fridge until it's almost set. The butter will separate, so before it sets, whipp it with a fork until it's unifrom and almost fluffy. Keep it in a covered container in the fridge for as long as you would keep the butter you started with.

I've told you how I like to use it, this in the picture was my afternoon snack yesterday. I've made the bread as well, from this book, that I recently bought and I'm very happy with it.

You can chopp the garlic as you want but I allways use a garlic presser for this, and would really recomend one. In fact I'll tell you a small story as a side note. I had a Spanish boyfriend that loved this butter and I allways made it for him. He would eat it with bread, cook with it, he loved it so much I think he even thought about bathing in it sometime. So when we broke up I gave him a garlic presser as a "break-up" gift, so he could make his own butter, lol! I'm the best ex-girlfriend ever!

And my ex-Spanish boyfriend reminds me of Spain of course! Spain, the new European soccer champion! Yeahhhhhhhhhhh! Viva la España! I was very happy for Spain, I've lived there for 3 years and consider myself a bit Spanish. So as I told here that I would bake something in honor of the winner of the Soccer Eurocup I'll have to bake some spanish goodie. Is there anything you would like me to bake or should I just pick it myself?

17 comments:

Clumbsy Cookie:Congrats on the award and thanks so much for thinking of me. I love coming to your blog for all the professional perfect looking treats. I'd love this olive butter. Que tal una tortilla classica con papas? :)